Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Guillotine! Guillotine!

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. They report, you decide.

One doesn't expect the spokesmen for conservative interests to be using the French Revolution as a model for future action. Of course, I'm no kind of cynicm and so all the calls for blood, all the evocations of victims carted off to some public square to be guillotined or of some Supreme Court justice bleeding to death in his bathtub like Marat aren't at all hilarious to me when I watch Fox News.

Whether it's terrorism, international crises, domestic crime or, in this case, excessive corporate greed, some conservatives seem unable to see problems as anything other than a nail for which the only solution is a hammer,

Charles Krauthammer, who like so many Fox denizens looks like he's overdone the Botox, told us all yesterday that we should hold public executions for AIG executives whose contracts include a bonus:

Have it in Times Square, invite Madame DuFarge. You borrow a guillotine from the French and we could have a party. If that's what it takes to maintain popular support, let's do it.

Conservative Mort Kondrake just wants to boil them in oil.

Okay, so it's hyperbole, although with paralyzed faces like these guys have, one has to make some guesses as to what they really mean. But inflammatory rhetoric in such times as these is like flicking your Bic with gasoline all over the floor. Put them together with Ann Coulter, who has advocated poisoning judges, and with Rush, who would rather have the country collapse than accept any offense to his "principles," and we have not only an assemblage of rogues but a perfect example of people who are not conservatives any more than were the Parisian mobs cheering as heads rolled in the Place de la Concorde in 1793.